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Phelps Store Closing: Another Newport Beach institution is also closing its doors.

The Phelps menswear store expects to shut down permanently by July, a month before it would have celebrated its 25th anniversary at Fashion Island in Newport Beach.

That will be the end of the line for a retailing business established in 1923, when the Phelps family opened its first store near the USC campus in Los Angeles.

The company survived wars, the Great Depression, several recessions and a couple of major earthquakes, only to fall victim to the latest economic slowdown and changes in the retailing industry. The trend now, said Steve Miller, who bought the Phelps store in 1982, is away from service and quality in higher-priced malls and toward the discounters and “category killers,” which offer name-brand merchandise for less by buying shrewdly and keeping overhead costs low.

“They are moving out around us and picking us off,” said Miller, who is a past president of the merchants association at Fashion Island.

Some of the changes, he said, have hit close to home. The Nautica label once accounted for as much as half of the store’s sportswear business. Then the apparel maker opened its own store near Phelps, and customers went there.

Along the way, the Phelps family made its mark on Southern California. Tom Selleck once worked as a clerk in the Sherman Oaks store, now closed. Hollywood’s elite once picked through yachting togs at the store on Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile. Miller himself grew up with the Phelpses at Lakewood Center when he was living in a nearby section of Long Beach.

Once the liquidation sale is over, only memories will be left.